Yeah, I'm with you, the afterimages w/ white on black are horrendous.
One trick, rather than copy-pasting, just hit ctrl-A to select all, usually those are decent colors, sometimes formatting is better preserved than with a full copy and paste
I've found that any site that uses stark white on black leaves terrible afterimages on my eyes when I go look another page, or general white area. Actually the afterimage starts as I'm trying to read the text, so as my eyes drift a bit the stuff gets less legible.
Is it more like walking into a library w/o a card and browsing the stacks and reading in the library, or like talking a book home?
You can't use your metaphor without answering which, and the answer explaining which is the more correct metaphor is probably more work that arguing the case itself.
That said this "everything that's not nailed down is ok for me to walk off with" mentality probably IS keeping the DRM race ratcheted up.
This was a very good book. Probably my favorite bit was hearing the history of Pac-Man Best Quote: "I thought that one of the things women like to do is eat. So I started working on a game concept based on eating." --Toru Iwatari, inventor of Pac-Man
Hearing about the SwyftCard idea was cool too.
Some of the best things were the artifacts, from in house materials to source code to random sketches and napkin plans: I made some banners for The Gamers Quarter with the early sketches of Pac-Man: http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2007.11.13
Even then, that's pretty soft core stuff, right? And usually with some token attempts at plot and what not, not straight to the action with a bajillion thumbnails...
Oh boy, I just got a headache thinking about the content of "slashdot.kids"
One thing I've been thinking about is how vastly more accessible porn is than ever before. What kind of anachronism will looking for native breastage in National Geographics be? Once upon a time I found visceral pleasure in very humbly sexual things, and a girly mag was an almost unheard of amount of pure sexual dynamoism. Now a whole array of sexuality gets piped to my house wholesale. My sexual maturation would probably have been different (not gay vs straight different, just different) if that had been available on anything like that scale in the 80s.
I'm not saying won't somebody think of the children, I don't think it's 100% good or 100% bad, but it's most definitely a change.
Re:Brand dilution continues
on
The Knol Hypothesis
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's an interesting concept and I hope you get some mod points, even if I'm not 100% convinced.
Google is scary right now; maybe even scarier than mid-90s Microsoft. I remember my more-business-side oriented coworker reading some article along the lines of "Microsoft Wins", that they could do or buy anything any smaller company started, so it was Game Over Man Game Over.
But I see Google being a lot more flexible in what it tries. While Microsoft became a hegemony of the desktop, Google keeps most of its interestingness on the server side, and have learned to make these tremendously scalable centralized apps. So their ability to A. put in production and B. MONETIZE nearly any idea they come up with -- and that whole 20% or whatever independent project thing, getting their very smart people room to try very clever things, is something I don't think Microsoft ever did.
(I'm also wondering about Amazon. I thought it was a dumb, dumb bit of dilution to get out of books, but they seem to have pulled it off.)
Heh, well, I'd call it more like "tracking 2.5d-position"... reading how close it is to the screen is an iffy proposition in every game I've tried it in (mostly Monkey Ball minigames and Red Steel). The 2D pointing is pretty good, though we've had light guns for a while, but when it then tries to calculate the relative width of the dots to figure out if the wii-mote is approaching or withdrawing.
I was bummed when I found the thing was definitely NOT "true" 3D tracking. Boxing would be a much better game, and baseball, and a bunch of others.
Correct me if you think I'm missing something about how it's tracking 3D...
Yeah, I guess that's fair to say. I was pretty young when the Atari was the bomb-diggity, and if memory serves, it was doing neat stuff before, say, Intellivision was. (I guess Astrocade might be in there somewhere, but I think it's fair to use popularity and exposure to judge impact)
I've done some 2600 programming, and when you read the techspecs, the system was SO geared at "arcade conversions of 1970s games" it's crazy. It's a testament to both the foresight of the original engineers to leave things open ended when possible, the cleverness of the programmers that came after, and probably being able to get a bit more ROM on a chip cheaply...
Devil's Advocate: the Wii brings 2 independently held motion sensing controls with an option for mouse pointer like capability.
That's it. Virtual Console's been done, everything else has been done.
I like the Wii, but it only really counts if it continues to be a success (which it probably will).
Like, the Eye Toy might have been a revolution in the same way, or Dance Mats. Or like you say, the Power Glove, if it had worked. Or the Amiga Joyboard. (heh, isn't that what Wii Fit uses?)
I do think the move into 3D, and immersive environments with decent physics, is ultimately a bigger deal, but that was a gradual evolution, and if anything was brought about by 2 systems nearly at once.
I'd vote for the N64 too - solid 3D graphics, inventing 3D genres, the triumphant return of the analog stick and 4 controller ports builtin, and load-time free carts... maybe the BEST social couch system ever, and solid for single player as well.
The 2600... you know, the very early catalog isn't that impressive, it really is a transition from the TV Pong and Tank games that proceeded it.
Oh, I dunno. Most systems, even ones I don't like very much (like the Playstation) brought something new to the table. I would say Nintendo's done more along those lines, with the every other generation taking the field in new directions, than any other single company.
While obviously there are more impressive demos from a graphics point of view (since SR is 15 years old), I'm still to see one with a better soundtrack and a better integration of video and audio.
I have... Panic, from the year before. Much more cohesive, much less of a mishmash than SR's "hey now look at this! now look at this! now look at this!"
Unfortunately, Panic doesn't seem to get a fraction of the love SR gets... I'm still a while away from setting up Dosbox or whatever (not sure if it would even work) but would love to see it on Youtube.
I have an iPhone. Now I know about the tendency of "after you buy a Ford, there seem to be a lot more Fords around", but even taking that into account, I see more iPhones than I expected to around Boston, especially on the T. I'd say the only single device I notice more of are Sidekicks.
Boston might not be representative, but given that it's a pretty pricey thing, I'm impressed with its marketing inroads already. (I'm also impressed with how much new functionality the upgrades have been adding)
I think the thinking is global "warming" was the wrong term of it, and the basis of too many WAY too easy jokes and half-assed observations during tough winters.
The warming is about energy being added to the system the result of heat getting trapped. This will lead to all kinds of medium term weirdness of hot, cold, wet, and dry (like, Snow in Baghdad, wildfires in CA) and only a long term warming trend.
I don't think your dumbass truck makes much of a difference but you're a clown if you're still using this "oh so this is global WARMING???" style argument.
Not necessarily any more than, say, a good runner should be concerned about the factory process behind their sneakers.
It's all about layers of abstraction.
I think it's appropriate for a programmer to only be interested when there's either a direct effect on what they're doing, or as an academic interest.
(And for that, check out Petzold's book "CODE", great stuff about designing the equivalent of an early-80s PC from telegraph-wire level logic on up)
I've had my share of low level stuff, programming an original Atari game in 6502 assembly a few years back. But I treat my desktop PC as a blackbox for opening up IDEs and browsers and Shells (to ssh to the server where the real stuff happens;-) and I prefer Windows as a desktop OS (usually Linux as a server, but in practice I'm not doing the admining for those) because I think they have put more attention into an easy to use UI that, thanks in part to mu familiarity with it, stays out of my way (my Linux desktop at work, I can't right click and copy an image to the clipboard. Why not? I dunno. Maybe I could learn to do it, but it's easier to just work around and save all this crap to temporary files on the desktop)
I just don't want to end up like that one "technical VP" of my first company. No matter WHAT level of analysis was appropriate, he'd always ask, what's going on at the socket layer?
I thought humor was supposed to be funny, and preferably original, and this fails on both counts.
"Do you want fries with that", unadorned, ceased counting as slashdot humor around 10 years ago.
Usually it's a mark of Engineer scorn for Liberal Artists; here it was just trotted out as a fairly damning accusation that this young programmer was already hosed career-wise; an accusation that deserved at least some kind of support.
You know, the one I worry most about is in terms of self-evaluation is "Self-teaching and love of learning", at least when in terms of technology for its own sake. Its sort of an unfortunate side-effect of "Hidden experience"; few flavor of the month technology on the server side seems to bring much new to the table, and so the learning curves just annoy me without a good promise of effort/reward ratios.
Sort of like my disinterest in OSes, and PC hardware; I want that stuff to just get out of the way of the interesting interaction work to be done.
---
Also, yeah, I tend to be a lot less worried about finding hidded gems of programmerhood than avoid the good-resume bozos.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
Even better conspiracy fodder: it's the Republicans, who think they have a better shot against Hillary as a polarizing political figure. Or who think voters are more sexist than racist.
???? That seems needlessly snarky, and in the most trite way possible... the whole implication he's headed only for a menial retail-ish job is both negative and not particularly wellfounded.
quite a leap between risking the death penalty from Google and risking a stint in prison.
Might I suggest you put "death penalty" in quotes?
I don't think Google wields quite that much power, at least not yet, and it's a very confusing sentence with an opposite meaning until the metaphor part kicks in.
I rarely here Wii being lumped w/ PS2 and not 360/PS3. Maybe we hang out at different places. Most people acknowledge the Wii is less powerful than the other 2 current systems, but then again some folks want to put the PS3 in a class by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm with you, the afterimages w/ white on black are horrendous.
One trick, rather than copy-pasting, just hit ctrl-A to select all, usually those are decent colors, sometimes formatting is better preserved than with a full copy and paste
This might get lost in the shuffle but...
I've found that any site that uses stark white on black leaves terrible afterimages on my eyes when I go look another page, or general white area. Actually the afterimage starts as I'm trying to read the text, so as my eyes drift a bit the stuff gets less legible.
Yeah, on a recent 2 week vacation in Japan I was dismayed that there weren't a ton of awesome cool stuff to buy and bring back as gifts or whatever.
The bank caught my attention, but was a bit pricey.
Instead I got virtual bubble wrap toys for everyone, and some Mario "sounddrops".
Oy, metaphor straining!
Is it more like walking into a library w/o a card and browsing the stacks and reading in the library, or like talking a book home?
You can't use your metaphor without answering which, and the answer explaining which is the more correct metaphor is probably more work that arguing the case itself.
That said this "everything that's not nailed down is ok for me to walk off with" mentality probably IS keeping the DRM race ratcheted up.
This was a very good book. Probably my favorite bit was hearing the history of Pac-Man
Best Quote:
"I thought that one of the things women like to do is eat. So I started working on a game concept based on eating."
--Toru Iwatari, inventor of Pac-Man
Hearing about the SwyftCard idea was cool too.
Some of the best things were the artifacts, from in house materials to source code to random sketches and napkin plans:
I made some banners for The Gamers Quarter with the early sketches of Pac-Man:
http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2007.11.13
Well, that's true.
Even then, that's pretty soft core stuff, right? And usually with some token attempts at plot and what not, not straight to the action with a bajillion thumbnails...
Oh boy, I just got a headache thinking about the content of "slashdot.kids"
One thing I've been thinking about is how vastly more accessible porn is than ever before. What kind of anachronism will looking for native breastage in National Geographics be? Once upon a time I found visceral pleasure in very humbly sexual things, and a girly mag was an almost unheard of amount of pure sexual dynamoism. Now a whole array of sexuality gets piped to my house wholesale. My sexual maturation would probably have been different (not gay vs straight different, just different) if that had been available on anything like that scale in the 80s.
I'm not saying won't somebody think of the children, I don't think it's 100% good or 100% bad, but it's most definitely a change.
That's an interesting concept and I hope you get some mod points, even if I'm not 100% convinced.
Google is scary right now; maybe even scarier than mid-90s Microsoft. I remember my more-business-side oriented coworker reading some article along the lines of "Microsoft Wins", that they could do or buy anything any smaller company started, so it was Game Over Man Game Over.
But I see Google being a lot more flexible in what it tries. While Microsoft became a hegemony of the desktop, Google keeps most of its interestingness on the server side, and have learned to make these tremendously scalable centralized apps. So their ability to
A. put in production
and
B. MONETIZE
nearly any idea they come up with -- and that whole 20% or whatever independent project thing, getting their very smart people room to try very clever things, is something I don't think Microsoft ever did.
(I'm also wondering about Amazon. I thought it was a dumb, dumb bit of dilution to get out of books, but they seem to have pulled it off.)
Heh, well, I'd call it more like "tracking 2.5d-position"... reading how close it is to the screen is an iffy proposition in every game I've tried it in (mostly Monkey Ball minigames and Red Steel). The 2D pointing is pretty good, though we've had light guns for a while, but when it then tries to calculate the relative width of the dots to figure out if the wii-mote is approaching or withdrawing.
I was bummed when I found the thing was definitely NOT "true" 3D tracking. Boxing would be a much better game, and baseball, and a bunch of others.
Correct me if you think I'm missing something about how it's tracking 3D...
Yeah, I guess that's fair to say.
I was pretty young when the Atari was the bomb-diggity, and if memory serves, it was doing neat stuff before, say, Intellivision was.
(I guess Astrocade might be in there somewhere, but I think it's fair to use popularity and exposure to judge impact)
I've done some 2600 programming, and when you read the techspecs, the system was SO geared at "arcade conversions of 1970s games" it's crazy. It's a testament to both the foresight of the original engineers to leave things open ended when possible, the cleverness of the programmers that came after, and probably being able to get a bit more ROM on a chip cheaply...
Devil's Advocate: the Wii brings 2 independently held motion sensing controls with an option for mouse pointer like capability.
That's it. Virtual Console's been done, everything else has been done.
I like the Wii, but it only really counts if it continues to be a success (which it probably will).
Like, the Eye Toy might have been a revolution in the same way, or Dance Mats. Or like you say, the Power Glove, if it had worked. Or the Amiga Joyboard. (heh, isn't that what Wii Fit uses?)
I do think the move into 3D, and immersive environments with decent physics, is ultimately a bigger deal, but that was a gradual evolution, and if anything was brought about by 2 systems nearly at once.
I'd vote for the N64 too - solid 3D graphics, inventing 3D genres, the triumphant return of the analog stick and 4 controller ports builtin, and load-time free carts... maybe the BEST social couch system ever, and solid for single player as well.
The 2600... you know, the very early catalog isn't that impressive, it really is a transition from the TV Pong and Tank games that proceeded it.
Oh, I dunno. Most systems, even ones I don't like very much (like the Playstation) brought something new to the table. I would say Nintendo's done more along those lines, with the every other generation taking the field in new directions, than any other single company.
I have... Panic, from the year before. Much more cohesive, much less of a mishmash than SR's "hey now look at this! now look at this! now look at this!"
Unfortunately, Panic doesn't seem to get a fraction of the love SR gets... I'm still a while away from setting up Dosbox or whatever (not sure if it would even work) but would love to see it on Youtube.
so where are you?
I have an iPhone. Now I know about the tendency of "after you buy a Ford, there seem to be a lot more Fords around", but even taking that into account, I see more iPhones than I expected to around Boston, especially on the T. I'd say the only single device I notice more of are Sidekicks.
Boston might not be representative, but given that it's a pretty pricey thing, I'm impressed with its marketing inroads already. (I'm also impressed with how much new functionality the upgrades have been adding)
I think the thinking is global "warming" was the wrong term of it,
and the basis of too many WAY too easy jokes and half-assed observations during tough winters.
The warming is about energy being added to the system the result of heat getting trapped. This will lead to all kinds of medium term weirdness of hot, cold, wet, and dry (like, Snow in Baghdad, wildfires in CA) and only a long term warming trend.
I don't think your dumbass truck makes much of a difference but you're a clown if you're still using this "oh so this is global WARMING???" style argument.
Not necessarily any more than, say, a good runner should be concerned about the factory process behind their sneakers.
;-) and I prefer Windows as a desktop OS (usually Linux as a server, but in practice I'm not doing the admining for those) because I think they have put more attention into an easy to use UI that, thanks in part to mu familiarity with it, stays out of my way (my Linux desktop at work, I can't right click and copy an image to the clipboard. Why not? I dunno. Maybe I could learn to do it, but it's easier to just work around and save all this crap to temporary files on the desktop)
It's all about layers of abstraction.
I think it's appropriate for a programmer to only be interested when there's either a direct effect on what they're doing, or as an academic interest.
(And for that, check out Petzold's book "CODE", great stuff about designing the equivalent of an early-80s PC from telegraph-wire level logic on up)
I've had my share of low level stuff, programming an original Atari game in 6502 assembly a few years back. But I treat my desktop PC as a blackbox for opening up IDEs and browsers and Shells (to ssh to the server where the real stuff happens
I just don't want to end up like that one "technical VP" of my first company. No matter WHAT level of analysis was appropriate, he'd always ask, what's going on at the socket layer?
I thought humor was supposed to be funny, and preferably original, and this fails on both counts.
"Do you want fries with that", unadorned, ceased counting as slashdot humor around 10 years ago.
Usually it's a mark of Engineer scorn for Liberal Artists; here it was just trotted out as a fairly damning accusation that this young programmer was already hosed career-wise; an accusation that deserved at least some kind of support.
You know, the one I worry most about is in terms of self-evaluation is "Self-teaching and love of learning", at least when in terms of technology for its own sake. Its sort of an unfortunate side-effect of "Hidden experience"; few flavor of the month technology on the server side seems to bring much new to the table, and so the learning curves just annoy me without a good promise of effort/reward ratios.
Sort of like my disinterest in OSes, and PC hardware; I want that stuff to just get out of the way of the interesting interaction work to be done.
---
Also, yeah, I tend to be a lot less worried about finding hidded gems of programmerhood than avoid the good-resume bozos.
And not condescending Slashdot posters.
Even better conspiracy fodder: it's the Republicans, who think they have a better shot against Hillary as a polarizing political figure.
Or who think voters are more sexist than racist.
???? That seems needlessly snarky, and in the most trite way possible...
the whole implication he's headed only for a menial retail-ish job is
both negative and not particularly wellfounded.
Might I suggest you put "death penalty" in quotes?
I don't think Google wields quite that much power, at least not yet, and it's a very confusing sentence with an opposite meaning until the metaphor part kicks in.
I rarely here Wii being lumped w/ PS2 and not 360/PS3.
Maybe we hang out at different places.
Most people acknowledge the Wii is less powerful than the other 2 current systems,
but then again some folks want to put the PS3 in a class by itself.
That "totally serial" (cereal?) is the dumbest, most-unfunny, injoke-that-should-have-stayed-an-injoke ever.